The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

by Xaviera Hollander

  A statistic that surprises most people is the percentage of eligible bachelors who patronize my house, when, in this day of sexual liberation, there is so much free stuff around.

  The fact that the single man turns up mostly after eleven P.M. is testimony in itself as to why he came.

  He has taken a girl on a date, wined and dined her, enjoyed her company, been turned on, made the eternal overture, and she has responded with some unflattering excuse such as: “I have to go home and wash my hair.”

  His ardor for her dimmed, but his appetite not sated, he takes out his black book and calls his favorite madam, and for less money than the cost of his evening out in most cases, can discharge his desires without any hassle.

  Married men, who make up the largest slice of brothel business, come for a variety of reasons. Geographically they may be out-of-town businessmen, or perhaps recently separated or divorced and not yet fixed up with a new girl friend. Others are wanting the exotic and unusual that they don’t see at home and are fed up with DIB (dead-in-bed) wives who just lie there like a starfish.

  Whatever it is a man is looking for, a high-class house should provide it.

  What happens when a man walks through a brothel door? Let me take you on a guided tour of my house, explain a few trade secrets, explode a few old myths, and try to establish the fact that a modern house no longer deserves the title “house of ill fame” or “ill repute,” but “house of pleasure.”

  On any weekday night there are four to seven girls on hand to entertain the customers, to say nothing of my book listing four hundred better-class hookers in the city who can be called in. That is not to say the house is like a sex supermarket; it is more like a boutique where exclusivity and good taste prevail.

  Mine is an international establishment, full of birds of different plume. I have blonds, brunets, redheads, Scandinavians, Eurasians, American Indians, Negroes, and several South American girls from Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina. The latter are famous for their big boobs and their love of sex.

  With girls like this a man from any corner of the world can walk through my door and be welcomed in his own language. I personally speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Afrikaans, and some Yiddish.

  On entering our calling, the girls usually choose a professional name for themselves, dropping their last name and adopting names like Red Peril, Rainbow, Blondie, Mia Cara, Teardrop; April, May, June; and one girl was even called Shan-da-Lear (as in “swinging from”).

  The girls who, work for me are expected to obey house rules when it comes to dress. Outmoded is the old idea that a brothel is a collection of girls all semi-dressed in baby-doll pajamas or their underwear. This to me represents a sleazy atmosphere, and the only one permitted to wear a negligee is myself. This is always an expensive figure-fitting Pucci or something similar from the best stores like Saks Fifth Avenue or Bergdorf Goodman.

  However, my rules aren’t nearly as strict as the most famous house in the world, Madam Claude’s in Paris, where the girls are expected to look immaculate all the time. Madam Claude, whose girls are dispatched as far east as Beirut and as far west as London, insists her girls buy their clothes from certain couturiers and are coiffed at certain hairdressers. She, no doubt, gets her own little kickbacks from these places.

  My girls aren’t given strict guidelines on what to wear, but rather what not to wear. I don’t want flashy, whorish clothes in the house. Look like a whore and you’ll be treated like one is my belief.

  I try to set an example in appearance for the girls, and I come on as natural as possible. I don’t wear any makeup, and my hair is always hanging loosely to my shoulders, arid always shiny clean. I try to make the natural atmosphere clear through my personality, and not so much through my looks, although my looks are good enough, I suppose. I don’t cover them up with artificial eyelashes, wigs, and false nails as a lot of girls do. I don’t even wear nail varnish, except on my toes.

  I look like a fresh contemporary girl, which is one of the reasons I do pretty well. My personality comes on strong, and this is one of the things that distinguishes one house from another – the personality of the madam. And that is also, why I am careful never to hire a girl with a stronger personality.

  As far as the girls’ choice of dress goes, they usually decide on something to flatter their particular physical attributes – a décolleté gown for a girl whose best feature is her bosom, hot pants with matching panty hose for a girl who has great legs, and so on.

  Hot pants are big with men, because legs turn a man on. Surprisingly enough, when a man comes into a brothel he doesn’t seem to care much what the girl’s face looks like. Obviously, he’s not going to make a grab at one who looks like Phyllis Diller, but to a customer, boobs, bottoms, and legs, in that order, are more important.

  Age, of course, is another factor in a man’s choice of bed companion. Somewhere along the line most men think girls should all be nineteen or twenty years old. A girl can deceive them a few years, but you can’t claim a girl who is twenty-nine is twenty-one. It doesn’t work.

  Men in their late twenties to forties don’t mind a slightly older girl, and if she has a good personality, she can even be older.

  I have one girl working for me, Carol, who is thirty-six and the mother of two teen-agers. Carol has a groovy head – that means she is well-read and intelligent – and genuinely loves men, and they can see it. American men crave affection from prostitutes, and Carol knows how to give it to them. If a bashful man walks in, she puts him at his ease by taking him to the bar, charms him, then guides him into bed. They seem to forget this girl is not eighteen, but twice that age. Of course, the soft lighting in the living room helps, too.

  A lot of customers have a problem choosing a girl, either out of shyness or because they are overwhelmed at the possibilities for selection. If that happens, it is up to me. I stand near him at the bar in a slinky outfit, softly put my hands on his leg at the inner thigh to put him at ease, and turn him on a little, then ask, “Would you like to make your choice?”

  Some are slightly embarrassed or don’t wish to embarrass the girl, so they will call me into the bedroom and say, “May I have the redhead sitting on the couch?” Or, “I like the girl in the white blouse.”

  Sometimes a hayseed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, is too confused to make a suggestion, so I make it for him. For me, making the decision is sometimes difficult, because all the girls are equally nice and dear to me, and I hate to favor one over the other.

  However, the girls who live in and pay rent have the priority over the callers.

  On the other hand, a girl can reject a man if he is impossibly drunk or looks like Quasimodo. The girl has to be doing well to afford to turn such a customer down, and a girl who is starving to death will have to take on the assignment no matter how bad he looks.

  When a choice is made, one way or the other, I bring the man to the girl and tell her, “Give him a guided tour of the house,” or “Take him to the mirror-room or the bedroom.” We never say things like “Give it to him,” or, as my first madam, Pearl, said, “Here he is, baby, fuck him.”

  I always speak with class and handle with class.

  Another rule of the house is the level of conversation in front of customers. I don’t want customers alluded to as “tricks,” “johns,” or “suckers.”

  Forbidden, too, is talk about money. Sometimes girls get carried away at the big money they are making and start comparing notes in front of the customers.

  I have some girls who have come in as shy little secretaries making $130 per week on the outside and think it’s great at first to make $50 extra a night. As they become more successful in the field, they become more competitive and greedy.

  This occasionally leads to talk of “How much did you make?”

  One cute little button I hired who came from Queens became so money hungry she was rushing men in and out of the bedroom and clicking away like a cash register. “I’ll suck your co
ck in the bathroom,” I heard her say when the bedrooms were full, and indeed, she got away with it. But in general a man prefers more for his $50.

  I like my girls to act ladylike and not like whores.

  However, I distinguished between the words “prostitute” and “whore.” My girls are the former.

  A “prostitute” is a girl who knows how to give as well as take. She knows how to make a man feel good even if he is underendowed, a lousy lover, four feet tall, and has a face only a mother could love. In that case, she should fake it and let him enjoy what he pays for.

  Speaking for myself, I try to always give warmth and tenderness and make a man feel like a king or a baby, whichever he wants, even though he is a cash customer.

  A “whore,” on the other hand, takes but doesn’t give – unless it is a small souvenir like VD.

  How does a girl behave in the bedroom? That is a matter of decision between her and her customer, within reason and within his budget.

  I make the girls understand that this is not some kind of Arthur Murray’s where it is a cut-and-dried case of who leads and who follows. If she has never sucked a cock before, I show her some of my home movies, which also give a good course in eating pussy in case a customer wants to watch that kind of a scene before going himself.

  A man mostly wants to relax here and be attended rather than attend. For that reason he will often lie back and ask the girl to do the work, which actually sits well with professional ladies because it makes less of a demand of their bodies.

  However, a girl can’t aggressively promote this position, or a man might say, “Let me call the shots – I’m paying the freight.”

  Highest on the list of preferences, after straight sex, is what is called in the trade “blow-job,” or fellatio.

  If a girl comes to me unskilled in this technique, I teach her how to do it on a banana. How to go with her vibrating tongue just under the head, where the skin is sensitive. And I must say, speaking for myself, I get great pleasure out of giving a man pleasure this way. I don’t enjoy it if he is a boring blow-job, as we call them, one who just lies back and doesn’t writhe or moan.

  Another request is for Greek style. That is, anal sex. If the man makes his desires in this direction known to the madam beforehand, he can be put to bed with a specialist. My Greek-style girl is a slim pale American blond who digs it no other way, despite warnings from her gynecologist to lay off, as it were.

  Around-the-world, or analingus, is another popular request, but, needless to say, not every girl wants to accommodate this desire unless she can diplomatically coax a man into the bath first and scrub up his rectum good. With this technique, men usually don’t insist if the girl says it turns her off.

  On the other hand, some men expect to be taken not only around the world but also to the far side of the moon and back for their money.

  There are those who want ten different positions, and their general expression is, “I want my money’s worth,” because to them $50 represents a stiff fee, so to speak. A funny thing about these types is that many of them want to eat pussy, but practically never kiss a girl on the lips, even when they are coming.

  What a girl does depends on the amount of time she has, or sometimes the appeal the man has for her.

  Some customers are so nice you want to give them the world on a silver platter. I recently had such a man.

  This man, Kenneth, was so delicious, with a beautiful body, but had been screwed up by bad sex. He was about thirty-two years old, married to a very square woman, and he had never fooled around or seen a prostitute until he came to us. The man’s looks and manners turned me on.

  Even though he was clean, I had in mind something special to do with him, so I suggested we take a shower together, and I washed him up back, forward, upside down, until he was squeaky clean.

  Then I took him to bed and started to make real love to him, starting at the toes, sucking each one as though it were a cock.

  Then I started kissing and sucking from his toes up and his legs and his knees, at the same time that I was crawling all over his body with my fingers.

  I worked my way up to his balls, which I sucked one at a time, while my fingers went to the bridge between his balls and his rectum, which caress he loved.

  Then I lifted his ass and went in with my tongue; and he had never had this done to him, and he flipped out of his mind. He was so beautiful, responsive, and clean, and I was going deeper and deeper with my tongue, and his cock and his balls too were going up and down, he was so excited.

  Then I put a little jelly on my indicator finger, and I started putting it in his ass, just a little bit, and I could feel that he got very tense. The ass is like a vagina sometimes – a warm opening to put a finger or a cock in.

  Then I took my hand away from his rectum, turned him gently over, and gave him a back rub. Then I teased him with my tongue from the top of his neck to his bottom.

  Then I tied a little tourniquet of surgical tubing around the head of his cock. This technique delays a man’s orgasm. You tie a piece of surgical tubing, or venetian-blind cord, around the head of his organ, but after he has a hard-on, because otherwise the blood can’t get through. The tourniquet stops the blood from circulating, so the balls get really big and the cock stays up, and he cannot climax.

  While I had him this way I greased up a little vibrator and put it in his ass at the same time as I started sucking his cock, and with all that going on he nearly flipped out of his head.

  After I had almost driven this gorgeous man wild, I pulled off the tourniquet and made love to him first doggie style, then with my legs around his shoulders, and finally tree style – him standing beside the bed and I hung on to his broad shoulder like climbing a tree. I gently put his big cock into my vagina and a bit awkwardly we climaxed.

  On the matter of orchestrating a climax, there is a professional secret to delay premature ejaculation, too. If a girl is sympathetic to the man’s problem, she can give him a tube of ‘Detane’ and tell him to rub some into the head of his penis. It will be sure to slow him down. Sometimes I use a psychological approach, like jokingly telling him to think of his mother-in-law’s funeral if I sense he is going to explode too soon.

  Usually, though, the reverse is the problem – to make a man climax when the meter is running over.

  I had one situation where everybody was screwing and nobody seemed to reach their climax, and my German girl, the resourceful Grethe, worked out a solution.

  I sent Grethe as captain of a group of girls to participate in a bachelor party a group of rich young men-about-town were holding in the penthouse at the New York Hilton.

  When my girls arrived they found a wild scene in progress, with a band and dancing on the ground floor and several bedrooms were filled with young couples, copulating in various positions.

  Grethe and my girls sat by quietly talking to their partners and awaiting their turn at the beds. However, after half an hour nothing was happening except a lot of quiet swishing around going on.

  Grethe grew restless and decided to hurry them up by staging a sexy atmosphere. On the same principle that one makes noise like running water to encourage urination, Grethe started puffing, panting, and groaning, and simulating orgasm sounds, and within five minutes everybody was doing the same. Then the first session of girls all ran to the bathrooms to wash up, and my girls and their partners hopped into bed.

  Needless to say, hygiene is a very important aspect of the profession on everyone’s part. A girl doesn’t want to do all kinds of intimate things with a man who is not fresh, and the reverse is true, too. Since I sell girls, I make sure they know all about shaving their underarms and legs, using lotions, bathing, and douching. A professional girl should be able to douche two to three times a day without exceeding a danger limit and risking drying the sensitive internal tissue.

  To protect herself against infection a girl tries to look at a man’s penis before he goes to the bathroom and has the chance to uri
nate, thereby concealing traces of disease. However, in a house like mine this danger does not occur.

  If a man wants protection for himself, he will ask for a rubber.

  Once or twice I have had a customer who behaved like a kid in a candy store, having several girls in a session, and the unaccustomed activity has caused a strain resulting in a slight discharge.

  However, in my two years as a professional, whether it is luck or the result of hygiene vigilance, I have never come across a case of venereal disease. I maintain that it is the little freebies giving it away in the First Avenue bars who spread this hazard.

  I am known to be obsessively clean, and the first thing I notice about a person is his or her fingernails. I drag a man over to the wash basin and scrub his hands if he looks grubby.

  Careful as I am, early in my career I caught a little devil called the crabs. At the first itch I took myself off to the gynecologist to be checked out.

  She was a dear old motherly type who probed around, located the demon, and took it on a slide to the microscope, where she confirmed my suspicions.

  “My goodness,” she said, “a crabbie, dear.” Then she added apologetically, “I don’t want to alarm you, but have you been with a man you don’t know very well lately?”

  Obviously I changed gynecologists and found somebody a little more broad-minded and equipped to understand the problems of a working girl.

  The man I found is the “trade” specialist, a groovy man with a practice near fashionable Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. This man is to prostitutes what a trainer is to professional football players. He keeps in good playing condition all the muscles and tissues and tubes that in our trade get overworked and sometimes abused.

  Although it is a myth that professional girls rush to their gynecologist for fortnightly checkups, whenever we have a problem, Dr. Jonathan Sayer, as I’ll call him, is the man we go to.

  He is a good doctor, broad-minded, devotes a lot of time to each patient, and his prices are fair – $50 for the first visit and $25 thereafter.

  He is also the first doctor I have come across in this country whom it is possible to be alone with. Unlike in Europe, doctors here have you all bundled up in gowns and tied with strings and presented like a giftwrapped package, with the nurse looking on like a hawk.